Leadership Reading to Start Your Week: 5/8/17

Here are choice articles on hot leadership topics culled from the business schools, the business press and major consulting firms, to start off your work week. I’m pointing you to articles about leadership, strategy, industries, innovation, women and work, and work and learning now and in the future. Highlights include what makes a CEO “exceptional,” how to tell leaders they’re not as great as they think they are, how companies say they’re using Big Data, how the Internet Of Things is transforming industries you would never think of, a new global measure of gender progress, the firm of the future, and the future of department stores.

Be sure to look for dots that you can connect.

Note: Some links require you to register or are to publications that have some form of limited paywall.

“Why do companies fail or fall behind their rivals? Among the many reasons, three stand out. Some companies miss a major strategic shift or industry disruption. Others see a big change coming but fail to develop the right strategy in response. And some define a winning strategy but are not able to implement it effectively. To increase their odds of success in today’s turbulent environment, leading companies are complementing their traditional annual strategy-setting process with something more dynamic. We call it always-on strategy.”

Industries and Analysis

“Jeff Gennette was named CEO of Macy’s Inc. in 2017. He began his retail career in 1983, as an executive trainee at Macy’s West. During our recent conversation with Jeff, intriguing insights surfaced as to the future of department stores.”

“The February 23 issue of the NY Times Magazine was devoted to the future of work, and in particular, to what it called the new working class. The Oxford Dictionary defines working class as ‘The social group consisting of people who are employed for wages, especially in manual or industrial work.’ The working class includes many traditional blue-collar occupations, – factory workers, truck drivers, electricians, plumbers, – but it also now includes an increasing number of white-collar and service jobs.”

Innovation and Technology

“Are companies seeing any value to their investments in ‘big data’? I’ve been surveying executives of Fortune 1000 companies about their data investments since 2012, and for the first time a near majority – 48.4% — report that their firms are achieving measurable results from their big data investments, with 80.7% of executives characterizing their big data investments as ‘successful.’”

“But in the late 1990’s computers became truly transformative. Combined with the Internet and email, they became conduits to a continuous flow of information that could be processed, analyzed and turned into action. As digital connectivity begins to transform physical machines, it’s likely that we’re now in the early days of a similar productivity boom.”

“The prevailing paradigm that has underpinned business for the past 50 years is under review. The simplest version of that paradigm is that firms exist first and foremost to deliver returns to their shareholders’ capital—and the sooner they deliver it, the better. We will describe the challenges confronting this paradigm. But the first question we asked as we observed the changes was this: Is such a shift unusual? Has the idea of the firm been consistent over time, or has it changed before?”

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